We pit the coating against a toilet, a Slip-n-Slide, and one editor's dignity.

You've seen the video, right? An image of what looks like an azure-colored metal floor plate appears, backed by some "Streets Have No Name" guitar knock-off. A mysterious hand is getting ready to soak this thing with a squeeze bottle full of water, but the first squirt yields puzzling results. Water beads up and shoots off the surface, leaving the plate bone-dry. Then the title: "What is Ultra-Ever Dry?"

That sequence has played out nearly two million times through YouTube (it's literally more popular than some official Justin Bieber offerings). The video is an endless cycle of items shrugging off water, mud, oil, dirt, paint, and other stickiness with eye-popping ease. Ultra-Ever Dry claims to be a "revolutionary super hydrophobic coating that repels water and refined oils using nanotechnology." Clearly, either the company has made a pact with the devil and gained supernatural powers, or it's got some awesomely talented materials people.

We were just as amazed as most of you were, and we knew we had to try this stuff out. Two hundred dollars and one expense report later, I had a box full of Ultra-Ever Dry cans sitting on the floor of my office, ready to be applied to things various and sundry.

We didn't just want to get some Ultra-Ever Dry and tell you about it, though—we'd much rather show you. Our call for comments on what we should test it with yielded some excellent ideas. Armed with your feedback, a DSLR, and a cameraman (the ever-patient Steven Michael, who has helped me photograph several NASApieces), we hit the hardware store for supplies and spent the weekend shooting video.

First: Reader discretion is advised

The Ultra-Ever Dry coatings in their liquid state are based on xylene (bottom coat) and acetone (top coat) and emit powerful amounts of fumes. Applying the coatings to anything inside a house or apartment is absolutely out of the question. Even outdoors, coming anywhere near the stuff requires nitrile gloves and a P100-rated respirator fitted with organic vapor filters.

Bottom line: if you're planning on getting some Ultra-Ever Dry for yourself and applying it, please take the appropriate safety precautions. Many people had previously indicated that they'd love to spray this stuff all over their bathrooms. I sure as hell wouldn't do that in my house.

Test One: Glass and toilet

Testing Ultra-Ever Dry on a pane of glass... and a toilet.

The glass

We kick off our testing with a 10"×12" cut sheet of plate glass, with the edges taped off for safety. Ultra-Ever Dry was applied to one side of the glass and left to dry overnight.

Ultra-Ever Dry is a two-part coating. There is a base coat that must be applied and left to dry for 20 to 30 minutes and a top coat which must then be applied and left to dry for another 30 minutes minimum. The Ultra-Ever Dry coating itself is not transparent; it leaves a whitish haze on things when applied (other colors are available if you're ordering in sufficient quantity, though). The evenness of that haze—and ultimately the efficacy of the Ultra-Ever Dry coating—is dependent on the application process. For maximum effectiveness, the Ultra-Ever Dry must be applied in a tightly controlled, very thin, very even layer (a wet thickness of 76 to 127 microns for the bottom layer, according to the documentation).

The mottled, cloudy appearance of the glass shows the limitations of our application method. We used the trigger hand sprayers available from the Ultra-Ever Dry store, but we were unable to get anything approaching a uniform coating with them. In fairness to the Ultra-Ever Dry folks, they did tell me that the hand sprayers would be insufficient for anything other than very casual use and that I should use an air compressor and pneumatic sprayer with a fine tip size. Sadly, I couldn't arrange access to this type of equipment in the testing time I had available.

If you're going to apply Ultra-Ever Dry to anything transparent like a motorcycle helmet visor or car windscreen or glasses—well, don't. But if you absolutely must, you should follow Ultra-Ever Dry's recommendations and use an application method which will yield a very fine, very even coating. You still won't really be able to see through it, though.

The toilet

There were a lot of requests for me to spray the Ultra-Ever Dry on a toilet in my house. Ha ha ha no, we're not doing that (nor are we putting it in my shower, or my bath tub, or anything else I actually have to touch).

However, our sacrificial toilet from the hardware store fared excellently when coated with the stuff. The difference between the treated and untreated portion of the bowl when pelted with water and poo wet potting soil is obvious. That being said, Ultra-Ever Dry is "air powered"—its ability to repel water and oil depends on being able to trap a thin layer of air. While Ultra-Ever Dry's documentation shows that the coating when properly applied will remain water-repellant at a depth of one foot for "months," you might need to periodically drain a toilet with Ultra-Ever Dry applied to the bowl (depending on the way water swirls around your toilet when you flush it) in order to let it "recharge."

Also, I'm not sure I'd set my nether regions near the stuff, as exposure can cause skin irritation.

Test Two: The driveway

Testing a section of my driveway treated with Ultra-Ever Dry.

Water on concrete

Requests that we test Ultra-Ever Dry's ability to repel snow on concrete were common, but that's impossible in my location. I'm in southeast Houston, and snow is something we see once or twice a decade (in March when we did the testing, daily highs were peeking back up into the 80s).

However, you can see above what happens to a small patch of concrete driveway when water is applied to it: the water sluices off the treated section. Examination of the treated area over several minutes actually showed a wet patch creeping further and further down across the treated area, which is almost certainly due to my hand sprayer application of the coating. When properly and evenly applied, the stuff will happily seal your driveway or sidewalk away from water.

At the end of the video, filmed several hours later, something unexpected happens: large drops of water are shown sitting stationary on the treated section. The water doesn't have enough mass to roll down the driveway, so it remains in place until it evaporates. This could potentially mean that a treated driveway after a rain storm might end up wetter than an untreated driveway, depending on how much rain has fallen and how steep the driveway is.

The other possible side effect of coating your driveway is contaminated run-off. The coating job I did resulted in no small amount of excess Ultra-Ever Dry being carried off by water or rubbed off by my fingers the first time each treated object was handled (you can see a thin film of Ultra-Ever Dry back in the first video in the water collecting at the bottom of the toilet, for example). Some amount of Ultra-Ever Dry will almost certainly be carried off of your treated driveway and into your yard and your storm sewer, and I don't know what the potential consequences of that might be.

One week later

A week after filming this, I re-tested the treated section of the driveway and found that exhibited absolutely no superhydrophobic properties at all—it had reverted back to regular driveway. The Ultra-Ever Dry site does make mention that the product is somewhat susceptible to UV exposure, but my application method is more likely to blame than anything else. If you plan on applying Ultra-Ever Dry to your sidewalk or walkway, you must be meticulous with the application. Hand sprayers are simply not going to cut it.

I'm really interested in the longevity of the coating with time and under medium use. Article did mention that it was all gone in one week when used outside (possibly due t oUV). How about under continuous use? Say, the toilet after 500 flushes (~ 1 year use, I think) .

I'm really interested in the longevity of the coating with time and under medium use. Article did mention that it was all gone in one week when used outside (possibly due t oUV). How about under continuous use? Say, the toilet after 500 flushes (~ 1 year use, I think) .

I think you could just ask the question "How long would a coat of paint last?". You'd be in the right ballpark.

All I could think at the 2:45 mark of the last video was "OH SHIT LEE WATCH OUT FOR THOSE BRICKS!"

Yeah, I was pretty sure that my motion was going to be arrested far short of the bricks

Plus, it was so damn windy that day that there really wasn't any other convenient way to hold down the far end of the S&S. The stupid thing only came with two plastic tie-down pins. Guess Wham-O is cheaping out on slip-n-slides these days!

The one thing that worries me about the drive way scenario is what would happen in the winter with a rain/snow mix. From the video it looks like it'd form small patches of ice once it froze which I fathom would make traversing it more difficult. Sometimes friction is a good thing (or bad, see the slip'n'slide example )

The toilet example actually looks like it'd have some practical home use provided you can apply the ultra ever dry safely. It'd be wiser to apply this to a toilet before installing it into your home. Unless you have some pets that like swimming/drinking in there, this would have great utility for the average person.

Kinda disappointed that some electronics were tested. While the iPhone 3GS died before testing, I'm surprised that the keyboard wasn't used for this. It was destined for the dumpster so why not?

Also nice job with the videos and definitely keep posting blooper reels.

This was a really fun article to read. I also enjoy the live demonstrations to go along with it. While this product doesn't look like it'll be the wet cure we'd all like to put on a million things, it does give hope that we could have some very cool materials to work with in the coming decades.

Regarding the last paragraphs, I like the video feature. I think it will work well on things like this, and particularly game/software reviews. It may even work well sort of replacing the "IM Chat" articles that you guys tried out. To me watching two people actually discuss the topic would feel more authentic than the IM logs.

On the topic of UED, I wonder what would happen if you put it on the keel of a boat.

Am I the only person reading who thought that, with shades on, Lee looks a lot like Suggs from the band Madness?

Probably, yes, you are.

Great videos. But Ars has done videos before, from MacWorld (or WWDC, can't remember which), the iPhone review, and Casey did one or two (you don't remember the bears?)

The quality and length were pretty good. I would definitely watch more like this. The scientific analysis with the spectroscopy and electron microscopy were really good additions that other sites might not have added. I liked the 3 minute segments, but an option to watch the whole thing at once might be good, too.

So in other words, the stuff is pretty much a useless gimmick. It's visible, toxic, hard to apply, and wears off quickly. Even before I knew this, and was watching the demo videos, I was thinking to myself "would I rather stain my work boots a chalky white, perhaps ruining the pliability of the leather, but have them be mud resistant, or just let them get muddy?".

Kinda disappointed that some electronics were tested. While the iPhone 3GS died before testing, I'm surprised that the keyboard wasn't used for this. It was destined for the dumpster so why not?

It ultimately came down to a question of time. For the keyboard, it became obvious once I started playing with it that the only way to make it really work would be to totally disassemble it and re-apply the coating to every part, inside and out. We only had about four hours to shoot the entire day's run of videos, and re-applying the keyboard coating would have taken up too much time.

Then there's also how much video you guys will watch. Counting the bloopers, we've got something like 15 minutes of footage here, including stuff that absolutely had to be shown (like the toilet). Plugging in a keyboard and testing it would have meant bumping something else.

Plus....like I said in the story, I don't have a sacrificial computer into which I'd care to plug a water-filled keyboard, and I'd already expensed...well, a lot of stuff.

Regarding the last paragraphs, I like the video feature. I think it will work well on things like this, and particularly game/software reviews. It may even work well sort of replacing the "IM Chat" articles that you guys tried out. To me watching two people actually discuss the topic would feel more authentic than the IM logs.

On the topic of UED, I wonder what would happen if you put it on the keel of a boat.

I'm not sure it would be all that helpful, though I could be wrong.

Funny story when we had it in the lab. I cut out a piece of the foil that Lee treated for us to put in the XPS and promptly dropped it on the floor. Being a good surface scientist, I set that aside and cut out another piece. Once we had the piece in the exchange chamber to go into the XPS, we set to playing with the piece I dropped. We tried putting it a dish of water and we found it was difficult to get it to float coated side down. It would actually flip over rather than sit on the coated side. When we did manage to get it to float on the coated side, but it would only make contact with the water in a small region. So in a sense, it increased the buoyancy of the foil a bit. The effect on something a large and heavy as a boat would probably still be pretty small.

Okay, good read and better entertainment. Between the S&S and you getting doused with the cold water...LULZ. Thanks for taking the hit for us readers!

Oh a serious note, I wouldn't want to coat my toilet with this stuff for the stated reason here in the article, but also for not wanting to dump the chemical run off from that stuff wearing away flush after flush into the waste water system, it has enough to deal with as it is. Not to mention my black toilet would look damned odd with a "white-ish" staining to it...

This must be the same stuff that's on my new rubbermaid toilet plunger. It's pretty insane seeing it in action. Yeah, water beads and rolls of of plastic anyhow, but it FLIES off with this coating. Bizarre to see in person.

THIS is what science is all about, my friends. Some serious Cave Johnson stuff right there.

Lee Hutchinson / Lee is the Senior Reviews Editor at Ars and is responsible for the product news and reviews section. He also knows stuff about enterprise storage, security, and manned space flight. Lee is based in Houston, TX.